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So proclaimed a sign welcoming Pope Francis to the island of Lampedusa last week, the southernmost slice of Italy piercing the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia — a surprise choice for the Pope’s first pastoral visit outside of Rome.

Lampedusa, whose traditional mainstays are fishing and farming, has become in recent years a migration epicentre, a primary portal to Europe for tens of thousands of Africans and Middle Easterners fleeing war, poverty and despair.

With a small painted boat serving as an altar, Pope Francis celebrated Mass, gazing over the sun-bleached hulks of shipwrecked migrant vessels that have carried over 8,000 souls in the past year alone to this small, treeless, 20 square kilometres of stone — 2,000 more than the entire residential population.

In keeping with his emerging penchant for simplicity, Francis eschewed the Mercedes Popemobile and instead rode in an aged, open-air Fiat. Stung by a recent failed crossing in which a dozen migrants perished, Francis tossed a wreath of papally coloured white and yellow flowers into the sea in their memory, describing their deaths as “a thorn in the heart.”

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According to the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic group advancing immigrant rights, since 1998 approximately 19,000 people have died trying to make this perilous sea crossing, victims of unreliable boats and unscrupulous human smugglers.

In his homily, the Pope decried the “globalization of indifference” that leaves the world community tearless when confronted by such massive human anguish.

“We have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business,” he told the crowd, which included just-arrived migrants from Eritrea.

“We are a society,” he lamented, “that has forgotten how to cry.”

As Vatican observer John Allen has noted, Francis’s decision to visit Lampedusa is anything but casual.

Imagine U.S. President Obama choosing to visit the U.S.-Mexico border as his first official visit outside the White House, and you get a sense of the symbolic and political resonance of Francis’s decision. The U.S.-Mexico border has become a flashpoint for a militarized U.S. immigration policy and the grisly site of thousands of deaths as migrants from Latin America attempt to cross the punishing Sonoran Desert into the United States. Like Lampedusa, it is where the First and Third Worlds uncomfortably and often tragically converge.

Though no names were mentioned, the Pope’s words were an unmistakable counterpoint to right-leaning followers of Silvio Berlusconi, who backed a deal with the late Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Gadhafi that entailed repulsing seafaring migrants before they had an opportunity to apply for asylum.

With the Vatican announcing the visit only the week before, it appears the decision was a highly personal one for Francis, unfiltered and perhaps unfettered by papal handlers. The lack of an entourage of religious and political VIPs also underscored the simple, serious and spiritual tone the Pope struck during his visit.

While Francis’s chosen destination for his first official pastoral visit is lined with significance, two potential meanings emerge.

First, given the relatively spontaneous and seemingly personal nature of the visit, Francis might be signalling to both his “handlers” within the Vatican bureaucracy, and to his fellow cardinals and bishops, that he will not be a “kept” pope. From extemporaneously wading into crowds at the Vatican to the washing of female feet on Holy Thursday to celebrating his inaugural pastoral Eucharist among refugees, Francis might be suggesting that he is open to persons, history, and the movement of the Spirit in ways that may not always fall in lockstep with the Curia’s protocols.

Second, with his profound yet lucid excoriation of the “globalization of indifference,” he may be suggesting that he, as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, does not want himself to become indifferent to suffering.

While bureaucracies, both religious and political, business models, profit and loss statements, structural adjustment regimens, and free trade accords do not cry, people do. And, the Pope reminds us, we should cry in light of a globalized neo-liberal economy that promises to raise all boats, but all too often only raises all yachts, leaving leaky, unseaworthy refugee boats, and their courageous, desperate crews, to founder in seas of indifference.

Stephen Bede Scharper, a former editor of Orbis Books, teaches religion and ecology at the University of Toronto. His column appears monthly. Stephen.scharper@utoronto.ca

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